Chip Design Hub: Open, Accessible and Scalable Infrastructure for Research and Education

Semiconductors and chips are a crucial part of everyday life in the United States. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the problems caused by relying on imports for these essential components, affecting the economy, healthcare, and national security. To ensure national security, there is need to control all aspects of chip design, manufacturing, and integration. However, bringing chip manufacturing back to the US requires a significant increase in skilled workers, including technicians, engineers, scientists, and support staff. Chip manufacturing processes involve complex modeling and simulation tools, which are not commonly used in education today. Only a small number of universities in the US currently educate integrated circuit (IC) design engineers, and even tripling their enrollments won't meet the workforce demand. More universities need to be enabled to teach chip design. Many research institutions face challenges such as lack of Information Technology (IT), legal, and hardware support, educational materials, and experienced instructors. Chipshub will be a National Chip Design Hub for all US universities and colleges, providing education and training that is critical to bringing semiconductor manufacturing back to the US. Chipshub will overcome challenges that span (1) content/products: creation of appropriate and sharable educational and tool content; (2) infrastructure/market: secure, scalable, seamless, user-friendly, well-supported, and sustainable web delivery of the content; (3) users/customers: reaching, engaging, incentivizing, and training faculty to teach and/or conduct research in IC design; and (4) sustainability through community building and growth across partners, users, and content providers. Chipshub will robustly and sustainably meet the key requirements for a national chip design hub, including licensing, access, and maintenance of commercial and open-source electronic design automation (EDA) tools for end-to-end chip design and verification; secure cloud-based availability of process design kits that span from open-source nodes to emerging technologies; and paths to multi-project (i.e., shuttle) integration. Chipshub will leverage past NSF investment in nanoHUB infrastructure, plus multiple other investments at similar scale: NSF gateway infrastructure; DARPA and commercial funding of OpenROAD and Precision Innovations; and commercial investment in chip design software. Chipshub team members have individually been at the forefront of the quest for accessible infrastructure that can serve training and workforce needs. This project will aim to deliver Chipshub as an infrastructure that is built to last. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.